Kickstarter Katchup – 22nd November 2012

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We are approaching the singularity. First there were bundles and then there was Kickstarter. That’s pretty much how I’ll remember the last couple of years. Exciting sci-fi god game Maia has done the unthinkable and combined the two. That’s an update worth checking out. Currently performing victory dances in the endzone are Hero-U and Shadowgate, while two promising RPGs fall short – one promises to return soon, perhaps too soon, while the other may be gone for good. And if all that isn’t enough for you, there’s also a one-man space game that’s quite a bit cheaper than Elite: Dangerous, an egg and Peter Molyneux. Let’s take a look.

The Rules

Featuring a game in this list doesn’t mean we endorse it. We likely haven’t played, and as such can’t say whether it will be worth your cash. That’s your call.

Letting me know about a game (which you can do via my name at the top of this article) doesn’t mean it will definitely be included. Leaving links in the comments is a good way to let other readers know about projects, but please email me if you want them considered for the list. Include the word Kickstarter in the subject line too if you care about making my life even slightly easier.

We only include games where pledges reach developers only if the target is met.

Projects asking for fifty billion dollars, with 45c in pledges, fall off the list eventually. It gives more space for other games.

Projects that have reached their funding get included in the Winners list, and then aren’t featured in the weeks after that, to give more attention to those that are still needing the cash. Tough if you don’t like it.

Be aware that there are two currencies in play. Always check!

When considering a pledge, remember that clicking the button defines your political stance and your views on the future of the industry. The Katchup takes no responsibility for your potentially accidental attempts to salvage/destroy everything that you hold dear.

Jubilation and a pint of ale for all. There shall be a new game from the creators of Quest for Glory. This was as close a finish as I’ve seen recently, bringing back memories of the early days of the gaming Kickstarter revolution, when every project was either an enormous runaway success or a desperate struggle for survival. Or at least that’s how I remember it but who can expect my memories of 1964 to be all that clear?

Hero-U might be partly a case of industry legends trading on their past but with almost an update a day through the campaign and a genuine sense of community building, the project page has been a great example of how to engage with a potential audience. It’s a little sappy but the final part of this update shows that managing a campaign properly makes a huge difference.

There are still around 40 hours left for the ultra-pretty remake of first-person adventure Shadowgate and it’s already a winner. It’s another project that looked close to missing the mark next week but, here we are, with a future of spikey, skeletal death ahead of us. Zojoi are going all out with the physical rewards but the only thing I’d be interested in, despite being generally allergic to geek/gaming t-shirts, is the reimagined MLB logo sported in the image below. Bring it to me and clothe me in it. I shall wait here, topless.

Antharion was just over a thousand dollars shy of its $15,000 goal. Orphic are planning to launch a new campaign in a week’s time, although if I were them I’d take the time out to refresh, rethink and enjoy some festivities. For many, pledges to Kickstarter, whether for turn-based RPGs or otherwise, will always come second to spending on friends, family and personal appreciation at this time of the year. Timing could be everything.

Bloody hell. Ars Magica didn’t even come close and Black Chicken aren’t planning to return to the project anytime soon.

There may come a time when we are able to create an Ars Magica game with your help, but we reluctantly believe it will not be soon. Which is a tremendous pity, because we believe gaming needs new, unique role-playing experiences, with original mechanics, stories and settings.

On one hand there’s Sui Generis, struggling to be defined as an interesting RPG beyond its engine, and here there’s a fascinating RPG concept that would probably have received more attention if it had spectacular tech behind it. I reckon there were two major problems here and I was guilty of the first. My initial understanding was that the Ars Magica game would be similar in style to the studio’s Academagia – I don’t think that would have been entirely true.

The second problem is that I don’t think enough people grasped just how awesome a generational RPG could be. The more I read about the plans for Ars Magica, the more I was reminded of King of Dragon Pass and then, sadly, I realised how little that reference means to the majority of people. Go and play King of Dragon Pass now as penance.

Is Peter Molyneux, referencing Cityville before Dwarf Fortress or From Dust, out of touch with modern gaming and its concept of god? Maybe he’s far too in touch with the trends and the changing face of interactions and communication. I find that his conversations and talks in recent times show an interest in the social centre of gaming rather than the exciting wilds and badlands. Project GODUS has already been divisive as the ideology of Kickstarter comes under increasing scrutiny. And then we all realise that it’s the ideology of individuals, creators and players alike, and it’s a platform with the same potential and pitfalls as any other. Mr Grayson spoke to Mr Molyneux earlier this week. It was emotional.

“Explore, trade, build, and fight in a beautiful, procedural universe.” I’m sure I’ve heard this one before and I’m pretty certain it was going to cost over a million pounds. Limit Theory looks like a hugely impressive project and it’s all the work of one man. There’s also a full development blog that goes into detail about progress, ideas and mechanics. Almost as if there’s already a good portion of the game in existence. That sort of thing won’t catch on, surely. I’m going to try and talk to Josh next week to learn more, because this could be a cracker.

A turn-based 4x strategy game set in space and hailing from the distant galaxy of Belfast. I forgot that Endless Space existed earlier this week, which was stupid because I think it’s great, but there’s always room on my hard drive for more star conquering. The video probably isn’t the most thrilling you’ll see today, but it’s not about big budgets and gravelly voiceovers, it’s about content. Although I do wish all the interesting content was frontloaded in the pitch. Could be one to keep an eye on this.

Remember Dizzy? The Oliver Twins sure hope you do. That’s one pricey egg. You could even go so far as to say it’s eggspens…nope. Can’t do it. The Olivers have this to say in a comment, when somebody queries the funding:

Thanks for the great questions…we’ll look to address the questions on our goal in a project update, showing our backers where there money will be spent is very important to us.

I’d love to know exactly what $2,400 (minus fees) can contribute to the creation of a game over a twelve month period, but I’d also love to experience just about anything that puts this forward as its story:

“The story begins in a stranded seven tiered city perched on the hump of a prehistoric turtle. Bungees and metal pulleys support the precarious tower structure that stratifies poor from rich. To maintain the health of their biological host the city employs its working class to nurture the turtle until one day a cancerous growth is discovered at the base of its neck. Thrown into panic at the news of its dying foundation the city leaders scheme at a solution, and the game’s true story starts…”

Giant monsters punch, claw and bite, a city ruined screams at their feet, shattered as if it were made of porcelain and peril. Monstrous beat ’em up Kaiju Combat has almost four weeks of its second Kickstarter attempt left and the future looks bright. Although the game won’t include licensed monsters in its first release, Sunstone “are first in line to bid on acquiring” the Toho license, which would allow access to Godzilla and chums. They reckon the license will be tied up for at least a year. In the meantime, they have their own roster of beasties and are taking design submissions from prestigious pledgers. Here’s what they have so far.

The Fallen London creators have only updated their digital card game once since the project launched, which usually makes me a teensy bit quizzical or critical. Engage with your backers, potential and otherwise, I mutter darkly and then translate my frown into words and throw them at the internet. I can’t frown at Failbetter though because they have an actual prototype of the game available, linked directly from the front page of the Kickstarter project. Now, look at this wormy fellow.

The new Dizzy game doesn’t have a demo but Spud’s Quest does. It’s a self-proclaimed spiritual successor to the brain-scrambling flip-screen puzzle adventures and creator ChrisD might well have rolled his eyes when the Oliver Brothers asked the public to lay a golden egg or two to fund their game. Or maybe it will draw more attention to Spud’s Quest? We’ll know in five days. Chris’ thoughts on how to make single screens stand out, even if they are just the places in between puzzles, made me smile. The smaller the canvas, the more likely that a single detail will become its master.

If Dangeresque hadn’t gone for the ultra-long Kryosleep Kickstarter there might actually be legitimate cause for concern. As it is, there’s still well over a month to raise the final £700,000. Did you know that the original Elite utilised less processing power than in one of today’s fizzy pop cans and cost sixteen digestive biscuit crumbs to create? I certainly didn’t until I decided it was true about twenty seconds ago. The FAQ has been updated. Anyone claiming that Braben might be out of touch with modern gaming clearly hasn’t studied his understanding of multiplayer bastardry:

Q: Can I destroy planets?
A: No. Think how quickly we’d be planet-less in the core systems in a multi-player game!

A spaceship, forever humping the drifting dust and debris that was once home to billions.

Slow-moving multiplayer compendium, Sportsfriends, offers three previously unreleased games at its $60 tier. One is a version of QWOP and the second to be revealed is Miracle Adventures in 2113, in which “players use the keyboard (or an analog stick) to control their craft and the mouse (or a second analog stick!) to control a magnet”. There’s a video but I have to admit, I’d stopped paying attention to what was happening on the screen because my ears were having an orgasm. The music is the work of the great Terry Riley.

The wrestling renaissance is a more difficult birth than I anticipated. The latest push involves one of the great features of any man-grappler worth its spandex – details on the Create A Wrestler functionality and the opportunity to access the necessary tools early and have your own design in the game at launch. To do so will require a minimum pledge of $50 and the team optimistically hope that “if we reach our funding goal, there will be enough roster spots we will likely be breaking a record for the most playable characters in a wrestling game.”

WaterMelon’s 16-bit RPG port has had a fairly smooth ride and should be a winner next week. A recent AMA on Reddit may answer your questions – maybe you even took part? I’m guessing that the original version, released on Mega Drive and Genesis a couple of years ago, was good enough to make people hungry for more, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t have any SEGA machines.

Maia might make it but it’s gonna be close. Much as I’d like to see the project succeed, Roth’s latest move is radical, kind of heartwarming and utterly terrifying. A new £56 tier provides pledgers with the Indie Hug Bundle, containing Death Ray Manta, VVVVVV, Project Zomboid, Revenge of the Titans and Battle Cave. All that and an extra copy of Maia on release. It’s a fine incentive and also a striking demonstration that for all its wonderful diversity, the indie community really can be a community. Despite all that, I must say that combining bundles and Kickstarter is unnatural alchemy and I fully expect to spend my Saturday afternoons writing the KrowdBundle Katchup in the near future. Don’t worry. I enjoy sacrificing my weekends to the eldritch machinations of the indie world.

The subtitle seems less apt every week. No updates since last time and only a trickle of funding. I had a great time with the original game, although I didn’t play for very long, so I was a bit surprised that this project doesn’t seem to have attracted a great deal of interest. A lot of blame seems to be attached to a weak initial pitch video, which has now been replaced, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that. I shall try to katch up with Blazing Griffin next week to learn more.

When I see people talking about Sui Generis, it’s almost always the engine that receives all the attention. “Ooooooo, them’s pretty physics”, a man wearing some trousers might say. “Indeed. But we have also built a world and a game!” is the invariable response from Bare Mettle. Britain’s Own Stephen Fry even got in on the action this week: “Lawks! These @bare_mettle fellows have the most amazing physics I’ve ever seen in a game engine. Truly awe-inspiring!” But what about the game, Stephen, what about the game?

Jim already mentioned the new video that explains the ‘Prologue’ part of Interstellar Marines’ title. The Interstellar’ is explained by all of the space and the ‘Marines’ is explained by guns. I’ve thought this looked hugely impressive from the first time I saw it but $600,000 was always going to be a stretch. I can’t see the campaign succeeding in its current form but let’s hope this isn’t the last we hear from Zero Point. Here’s the video again for those who missed it.

Maybe that tutorial demo thing worked after all. I still haven’t tried it myself but pledges seem to have shot up and this multiplayer musical strategy game looks like it’ll be crossing the line sometime next week. It’s almost as if demonstrating that there’s something behind the talking head videos actually helps to convince people to fund the game!

Kickstarter funding goals do not necessarily represent the entire funding for a project. In fact, I would hope that in many cases they don’t, because as ambitious as multi-hundred-thousand/million+ asks may seem, they don’t really represent a great deal of funding for an entire team working on a project of any significant size. They might very well be dipping deep into their own pockets.

But in any case, the value of Kickstarter as a funding mechanism is that if your project succeeds, you -know- you have an audience. You don’t get that from just hunkering down and spending your own millions.

You both have a point really. Yes I expect Molyneux probably does have enough cash and definitely has enough highly skilled contacts, not to mention an already existing game studio, that he could easily back and produce the project through his own steam. But the Kickstarter buzz that surround these big names entering this very public forum for game development is very lucrative beyond the initial funding.

Of course there is no way of knowing how much the project will cost Molyneux, or any of the other big name dev personalities we’ve seen turn up with kickstarter pitches (and I’m certainly not saying all well known game developers are loaded, far from it, although in Molyneux’s case I’d suspect he’s got a fairly ‘healthy’ bank balance). However I’d take them more seriously if they had better prototypes and not just a bunch of ideas and art concepts with the fuzzy beginnings of a tech prototype. I think too many people look at Kickstarter as being a literal replacement for a publisher, “here’s a great idea, will you pay for it to become a reality?” Rather the question should be “Here’s an Alpha or Prototype stage workings on a good idea, here’s what we want it to become, will you back us to get there?”

As for funding, with Kickstarter you basically have to make your own mind up on whether the overall price tag is realistically reasonable or not. In the case of Project GODUS I’d say it’s on the low side, with a small studio (wages) and a genre where games tend to be a combination of many relatively complex systems working in tandem and being open to manipulation by the player, whilst trying to stay fun and engaging at the same time with at least a resemblance of build and progression the longer they play with the systems (lost of time re-working systems and the slow down and path changing that brings to development cycles) 450k would be around 2/3’s of what I’d reasonably expect a project like that to cost, at the very minimum. Take the studio out (or at least the wages) and it’d be do-able, but for just a 5 man team working for one year on a relatively low industry standard wage you’re already looking at a big chunk of that budget gone, and I imagine Molyneux’s studio pays fairly well and consists of more than a five man team.

I never back anything (bar double fine due to the promise of being able to watch the whole process from start to finish carried it’s own appeal, and so far has delivered) unless it’s obvious that they’ve already started prototyping stuff, or even better have finished prototyping stuff, show some of that stuff, present a clear idea of where they want the game to go, and it sounds like something I’m as certain I can be that I’d want to give a go presuming all their aims are realised.

Needless to say I rarely back anything because most of the pitches are just concepts with a hazy outline of genre and old game comparisons with a few high concept goals and a plea for thousands of pounds. I can almost excuse the bedroom programmers with a lofty large scale game idea they never previously thought they’d ever be able to attempt making, but the big names, surely they could get something done with a little help from their friends and sometimes studios before asking for hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds. Even when they aren’t, and for fill my criteria of having already started building it and show some of what they’ve done so far, more often than not it simply doesn’t excite me.

Because Molyneux isn’t a charity either? If you aren’t interested in his proposition (pledge this much in return for x) then don’t take him up on it. He isn’t somehow not allowed to use Kickstarter as a funding option just because he happens to have money of his own.

People have funny ideas about what Kickstarter is and how money works.

That’s pretty much what I said Jimbo with the addition that I doubt the money the raised will be the total cost of development on project Godus if they just hit their funding and that if they and other teams had a bit more work to show with their pitches, as in some early stage work on tech or better yet tech combined with gameplay I don’t think people would be as cynical.

Some are very good in this respect, but many and their ranks include far too many big names for my liking aren’t, they just say “hey guys remember that game we made many years ago which I’m now going to reminisce over fondly for the next 6 minutes of this 8 minute video, we’re making something like it but more modern here’s a couple of pictures that might be in game or might be concept we aren’t making that clear our goal is half a million thanks bye”.

Actually, Kickstarter is an NGO, and it’s basically a charity. It’s purpose it to enable people to support themselves while doing something they really wanted to. Judging by some actions, I suspect Kickstartes isn’t exactly happy about the pre-order stuff putting all the photo albums, weird dance performances and insane megalomaniac world dominationimprovement projects at risk.

It’s not ‘basically a charity’ at all. Most of the money that goes through Kickstarter is pledged on the understanding that something will eventually be gained in return. That’s like… exactly what a charity isn’t.

Is it really an NGO? It certainly doesn’t work like one, and I thought it was a business platform like any other. Sure enough, with a very different structure, but business platform nonetheless. It would seem like intermediaries are gone but it really comes down to KS and Amazon being the intermediaries instead. You’re not doing the world or poor people a favor by giving 10% of your money to KS and Amazon, after all.

I’d like to ask how you know that, because I can see no indication of a not-for-profit status for Kickstarter anywhere. It looks like a perfectly normal business to me. At best, it might be considered a “not just for profit” NGO.

Not saying people shouldn’t pledge to Maia, I just don’t get what I’m supposed to be saying ‘No’ to Molyneux for. It doesn’t seem like a one vs. the other situation. The fact that Molyneux has money of his own seems completely irrelevant to me – I’m just pledging in return for something, that’s it. He’s selling a game, not rattling a tin. That a lot of his professional and financial success has come from creating some of my favourite games of all time doesn’t exactly strike me as a compelling reason not to back him either.

I’m not gonna claim that Molyneux has done much worth talking about in recent years (he hasn’t), but I’ll stack up his back catalogue against Simon Roth’s any day if that’s really a route people want to take.

I don’t really know either, but that guy posited that it was a “one or the other” choice. Which for me, it really is. I don’t care about Godus, and I doubt Molyneux is going to ever come up with anything actually good ever again.

I suppose I was voicing my disdain for him in general, in that he should be doing what Simon is.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I prefer to support projects because I want to say YES to them, not in order to say NO to other more or less unrelated projects. There’s enough negativity around as it is.

(Although people should support Maia anyway because it’s looking awesome.)

I know it’s not doing particularly well and the Pitch isn’t the best, but yet I wonder why this wasn’t mentioned at all on RPS xDlink to kickstarter.com
You’d think Realms of Arkania/Nordlandtrilogie and the guy displayed on the Planescape: Torment box as well as the guy behind Betrayal at Krondor, Might & Magic 3 and Dungeon Siege would deserve a mention.

Potentially interesting. But looking at the kickstarter page, I’m rather put off by the idea that parts of the game will only be available to those who donate above a certain level (I guess it’s a bit like day0 DLC, except that there isn’t even the excuse of wanting to keep the team working while the console versions are certified).

I actually have much less of a problem with it for board/card (rather than computer) games, where you’re getting a real physical thing – extra counters, or fancy dice, or an expansion board – for that extra cash. Although if they were saying “game (2-4 players) for $n, but if you pay $n+10 we’ll give you the rules for solo play as well”, I’d find that as hard to take as the “special dungeon for people with lots of money” thing. (I don’t like pay-to-win games, either.)

With pre-order DLC, you almost always get the chance to buy it later as paid DLC. At the very least, if you come to the game late, then you have the opportunity to buy the extras.

At least with Thorvalla, it is only an extra $5 over the $30 price to get a large extra area.

But look at the card game Boss Monster. $5 over the $20 price got one extra card. $10 over the $20 price, or an extra 50%, got you 7 extra cards. It arguably got worse as the game raked in support, as the latter stretch goals were all bonuses exclusively for the “paid more than the game’s price” tiers.

Zombicide had 3 promo survivors (and their zombie counterparts). For the third promo, you have to pay $25 over the $75 “get the game” price. Interestingly enough, you could get the first two promos from tiers below the “get the game” price. I guess if you weren’t sure you had $75 to drop on the whole game, you were given the chance to spend $25 or $35 to get the first two promos, and then buy the game itself post-Kickstarter for $90.

I’ve wondered why Thorvalla hasn’t got more press too. Has two well known names attached to it, but the press coverage has been non-existent even though Guido Henkel said that he’d contacted various press outlets.

Sad and strange, as the producer of Realms of Arkania and Planescape: Torment is surely someone to watch.

Oh, the Nordland-Trilogie definitely were the games that made me, and even I didn’t hear from the KS before now.

Well, granted, the pitch doesn’t look like much at first, but if you read through the wall of text, it becomes clear that Henkel actually wants to go for quite a few of the things that made the Dark Eye games so vastly complex and rewarding, plus a few new ideas that do not sound too shoddy either. (Like a deck-building/tactical hybrid battle system.) It actually sounds more interesting, mechanically speaking, than Project Eternity.

So, maybe, Adam, this might be of interest to you as well, even though the fiction looks frankly way more generic than the one in Ars Magica?

I don’t really understand the comments about Sui Generis, it never seemed particularily generic to me, and they’ve posted lots of interesting stuff about the game after John’s article. It kinda seems like people have made up their minds about it, which is a shame because unlike all those oldschool games, it sounds like they’re planning to do a lot of cool new stuff.

Came to say exactly the same :) I cannot believe there’s that general thinking about the game “only being a pretty engine”. I mean, most of the damn games on kickstarter are just concepts! Yeah, it is cool to say: our game will be nothing like you have ever seen! it’ll be revolutionary! Innovation is our lema! But they’ve made nothing like this yet.

If you take a look at the updates, you see those guy have really innovative ideas and concepts for the game mechanics, and some even half-implemented and looking so completely astonishing (the inventory system looks awesome, for example). And a DAMN AMAZING ENGINE, too. And even though, people prefers to throw money at vague generic (and probably exagerated) promises.

I agree, maybe what they’re presenting is too innovative/ahead of it’s time for the standard gamer.
Out of this list my 2 favourites are Sui Generis and Limit Theory (notice that both of these game are made by a single guy, like Timber & Stone which is already funded and will be amazing too :)
Although it’s definitely nice to have some big budget games like Star Citizen and Project Eternity, it’s painful to think that it would only take 1/60th of Star Citizen’s total pledged amount to finish funding Sui Generis…

They have posted some generic lore, the most generic plot setup in the universe, some generic gameplay information (open world! choices!) and a piece of dialogue that’s not just generic, it’s genuinely godawful. Also, a combat video that shows off an incredibly simplistic and seemingly clunky system.

Nothing from what I’ve seen so far points to a good game. I would love to be proven wrong though.

I really don’t need to reply this, you’re just the last raging troll refusing to face extinction. Everything you say has long been answered, or it’s just plain ridiculous to begin with. I just can’t help myself though, I just have to engage in the futile excercise of answering to things that lack even the slightest hint of objectivity.

Nothing about our “lore” is in the slighest bit generic, not even the little we’ve revealed. Anything that might appear generic is in fact a parody. You can’t even imagine how much we hate generic fantasy, we find it deeply insulting. We’ve also said we’re not going to explain it in detail becasue we want you to discover it playing the game. This isn’t a bloody excuse. We’re not trying to trick people here!

So you don’t like our writing example. Fair enough. I must wonder however what you might be comparing this to contextually. Also, as clearly stated, this was provided a stylistic example and not an actual dialogue example.

Generic gameplay? Seriously? We’re breaking like every single convention in the genre here and introducing numerous completely original concepts. How can you possibly even claim to surmise that it’s generic?

Saying our combat is “incredibly simplistic” has to be the most objectively false statement I’ve heard in quite some time. Again, how did you arrive to such a conclusion? Did you read any of the provided material or did you just conjure this up from some arcane source of knowledge?

And please stop treating us like we’re some sort of marketing savvy company using buzz words. We’re being completely honest about everything here and explaining _exactly_ what we mean to do, not finding some excuse to claim that we’re going to do it.

Oh, a quick reminder: we haven’t made a game yet, we are providing a concept here like many other Kickstarters. The exception is that we’re also proving we can and want to do things, we’re not just raising money to mope around and play with the Unity engine.

Ugh, especiallly that last comment was just painfull and really unprofessional.
Making games and using kickstarter means having to deal with trolls. If you can’t, you really need to find something else to do.

Anyway, since when do people (no matter how “professional”) not answer to libel and slander? What’s said in this article and the comments people make are just plain unfair. We’re just people who are trying to make a game, we made some terrible mistakes with our pitch, we have zero experience with anything like marketing, you can’t hold that against us forever.

“we have zero experience with anything like marketing, you can’t hold that against us forever.”
Then stop with the terrible marketing ;)
Posts like your previous one does not in any way help, and could even potentially turn people away from the project due to its sheer hostility.

You’re not seriously going that route, are you? You’re professional once you start accepting money to do a thing. If you’re not taking money, you can waste your time participating in all the Usenet flame wars you want and few people will care.

Responding angrily to a troll (I have that person on my block list, so I assume they are in fact a trollt) helps no one. Absolutely no one.

Yes, you are professionals, as many already pointed out.
The thing that peeved me the most tho was your sideswipe at devs using Unity.
So you got a kickass engine, woo fuckin hoo. No need to act all smug towards those who use a 3rd party solution. (And doing some kick ass things with it as well, just look at Castle Story, Timber and Stone and McDROID).

The real funny thing here is that a number of the Kickstarter CRPGs are using Unity, and pretty much all of them look to be better CRPGs than this game here. I’d be amazed if this game turns out better than Wasteland 2.

I was ready to give the game the benefit of the doubt, but it was in fact this attitude that caused me to cancel my pledge some time ago. Make a rage post, then say “Oh that? That wasn’t a rage post, I was just joking! Or maybe I just being honest? Or was I genuinely asking something? Yeah, I’ll go with that.” – without apologizing in most cases, of course. Insult someone who spells out his thoughts about the game, then say “Hey, I didn’t want to insult anyone! How silly of you to think that!”. When parts of their work are being criticized as generic, the answer is “NO IT’S NOT! Because of REASONS! And IF(!) anything seems generic, then it’s only to mislead you and/or it’s PARODY! How can you not see that, you stupid, stupid lower class people?”. They put up “great samples” of their dialogue, which, when not being well received, they’re “obviously not satisfied with” – then why post this as a sample in the first place? When asked what their game is actually about apart from the generic parody setup about the chosen one and an ancient evil that is up to… well, evil things obviously, it’s all “It doesn’t exist yet, how the hell should we know?”, which doesn’t make me trust them very much if they haven’t got anything but the most superficial stuff planned out properly despite of wanting to make this game for 15 years.
Oh, and the perpetual excuse for all the horrible interactions with the public: “We’re not PR or marketing experts! That obviously means anything we say is okay!”. Most of that stuff – rage posts, insulting users – is not about knowing how to do proper marketing or proper PR. It’s about not being a dick in public to people who you want money from and about simply not posting when you’re having a fish up your butt about a comment that irritated you.

Congratulations. With your condescending tone and petty arrogance you lost at least a few backers. I gave my honest opinion, so that suddenly makes me a troll? Has the internet sunk THAT low?

Yes, my opinion is based on ALL of the updates you have posted so far, each and every one I’ve read thoroughly and I’ve watched every video. Some of them do address the issue of the perceived genericness. NONE of them actually give a single argument to prove it isn’t. Your whole backstory is bland and stating that it isn’t won’t change my mind, showing off something original will. The rest is generalization, bold and baseless claims, lists of uninspiring skills and, of course, that combat video where you explained the combat mechanics (move with WASD, click on enemies, SO DEEP) and that dreadful tidbit of dialogue. Around that last one you lost me, story and dialogue are maybe the most important things for me in a RPG.

You appear out of nowhere, claim to have the best idea ever and, when someone doesn’t see what’s so special about it, you insult him even though you are supposed to make him GIVE YOU MONEY. Not only is that unprofessional, it also speaks volumes about your maturity. If stating an opinion means trolling, then let me get back to my bridge.

I would just like to point out that there are few online communities with as much class as RPS. I can’t think of any other glorified blogs that would feature such calm responses to Madoc’s…misstep here. I hardly ever comment anywhere, and I don’t recall ever having participated in a flamewar or general dressing down of another user, but his post was about as close as I’ve ever come.

@Madoc The main issue with what many of us are seeing with Sui Generis (if I may speak for others), is that, despite some interesting systems — there is no proof of an interesting game. There is much more to building good games than throwing physics, weather, and real-time lighting at the player. I applaud you for trying things differently, but don’t think you are the first to come up with all these ideas (some maybe, but not all). Don’t be surprised if the result isn’t automatically the best game ever.

You can’t handwave away complaints that the game looks and sounds generic. You can’t address that concern by saying, “Don’t pay attention to the stuff you’ve seen, look at all the stuff that doesn’t exist because we haven’t made it and don’t really discuss with any clarity because we aren’t clear on it ourselves.” That is very silly.

Your comment about Unity, while likely driven by frustration, also underscores my whole concern with Sui Generis. It has been made clear that the Kickstarter was began with little to no game in development. Just the engine. You want time and resources to use the engine to make the game. And you think that it will be straightforward because you already have the engine. First, that is one reason people are using Unity. I mean…really, you don’t see the parallel? Second, it indicates a really lazy attitude toward the actual game part of the game. You think you can knock out something compelling from conception to completion that easily?

Also, the implied insult is really disgusting. You may not have meant it the way it came across, but, it certainly read like you think that writing your own engine puts you in some sort of higher plane in the developer world. Is that the message you want to send?

Ok, that was a very bad way to put it but I certainly wasn’t trying to insult anyone. I’m frustrated because this one criticism we receive here on RPS wouldn’t hold against _anyone_, so why us? My point is that we’ve already put a _lot_ of hard work in. We’re not just testing the waters with a concept here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but we’re doing more, that’s because we’re passionate and hard working too!

And enough with the professional now. It was a joke, there was even a smiley there..! Yeah, I did a rage post and acted unprofessional.Then I joked about it. I’m only human and this quite upsetting.

Absurdly if all we’d shown is our concept (just as it is) probably no one would have questioned it. Because we’ve shown more we now also have to demonstrate a complete game and not just the ideas behind it.

I still simply do not understand how you can’t see a game in there. What would constitute a game? I have no idea at this point. A blow by blow of everything that will happen in a completely non linear, sandbox game? That’s not actually possible… So what is it? This “lore” as people likes to call it now, we’ve given a pretty damn clear view of pretty much exactly what you might expect to find in the game world. Yes, there’s more we’re not revealing but that’s just more. What else do you want? Dragons? There are none. Elves? None of those either. Sorry.

I’m truly baffled by this. Who was able to demonstrate more of a game without actually having a developed game to show yet? I honestly don’t know and I have tried to find out.

Who says we’re not clear on anything? We’re crystal clear on more than can be expected, let alone that we’re early in development of the actual game. Yes, including the “lore”. It’s ridiculously detailed. We started developing it 15 years ago and we’ve got so much of it’s coming out our ears. It includes pointless details like cheap candles being made of tallow and being smelly. Probably you’re just looking for something that is NOT in our game. You’re not going to find that, go figure.

Obviously there’s nothing we can do to dispel this opionion that has formed on our game. I can only guess that people are looking for something that it is not and this prevents them from understanding what it actually is.

“I still simply do not understand how you can’t see a game in there. What would constitute a game? I have no idea at this point. A blow by blow of everything that will happen in a completely non linear, sandbox game?”

I think something as basic as a couple of maps of your game world and some ideas of who the people in it are would be a good start. Maybe also something a little more specific than “be the chosen one and fight skeletons and trolls” regarding what the game is actually going to be about. There honestly isn’t a whole lot of detail at the moment.

Do you know why people fell crazy for FTL? Made by devs without any experience AFAIK, complete nobodies that managed to raise 20 times what they asked for? Because they had the grace to tell us and, better yet, SHOW US what makes the game stand out. Just one example out of many. What did you show? Cool physics and lightning, somewhat pretty, but bland landscapes, awkward swordfighting and an art style indistinguishable from any RPG out there. ANd let’s not forget a rather stupid statement that this game will be Morrowind meets GTA of all things. No story, no actual gameplay mechanics, NOTHING. OK, I thought, I’ll wait for a while and see what they show off next, maybe there is an actual game in there that we are missing.

First update – lore time! Feudal world ruled by evil magicians! Sweet lord, isn’t that just the most original thing in the world! It’s so dark and inspiring! And there will be no orcs and elves, no dragons, that makes us original! But other strange races will make an appearance! Like that ogre in the pitch video, he isn’t an ogre really. I mean, he looks like an ogre, fights like an ogre, seemingly behaves like the most typical ogre concievable, but he’s not an ogre, no sir! Umm yeah, what a great example you made there. Even the magic has a fancy name – thaumaturgy! Awesome! Some sort of a map, a list of existing feudal countries, something about the past of this world and how it came to be the way it is? ANY of the mystical races? Nothing. Right…

Then comes the backstory! You are a common villager! But no, you actually are The Chosen One (TM) and there are dark, “ominous” events transpiring in the world! Oh, how inspiring.

And besides that a lot of bold claims. Dynamic world! Dynamic story that goes on without you! How does that work? No idea, but the act of promising such things surely means you can keep those promises!

Status after first update – skeptical. I’ve yet to see a game in there. Where do Morrowind and GTA figure into all of this?

On to the RPG system in update 3 – 8 skills, 6 levels of expertise, 6 types of magic. Sweet lord, and they said Skyrim is dumbed down. What do the skills actually do? Light Weapons, that’s easy enough, but what does Concentration do? No idea, you didn’t care to explain. And what about non-combat skills? What about crafting, traps, poisons? No mention anywhere. And how do you level up them skills? By using them “relatively frequently”, but watch out, if you use them “more frequently” your proficiency will not increase. Ummm, yeah, awesome. I thought I saw a bit of Morrowind in there, but I might have been mistaken.

Status after third update – starting to think you really have no idea how to make a good RPG. What the hell does this game have to do with GTA?

Update 6 – combat time! You move with WASD, click to attack. Parrying is automatic. That’s it. o.O Where do your skills as a player figure into all of this? Go figure, you never explained that either. Maybe a combo system, different kinds of attacks, anything? Nope, WASD, left click, that’s it. Well, at least on paper it does sound like Morrowind now that I think about it

Status after update 6 – lost faith in the only gameplay mechanic you have shown us. Still waiting for an actual game. What the hell does this game have to do with GTA?

Status after update 7 – :/ ?! What the hell does this game have to do with GTA?

Update 11 – items! Slotless system with 100 slots! Wait, what? And you think we are going to keep track of a 100 slots we can’t even see? And this is going to be well balanced balanced in any way, shape or form?! Seriously?! Either all items will have stats (broken balance, too many to tweak) or with so many slots, none of them will actually matter. Or both. Finally we do find out there will be no player crafting. Basically so far the only thing the player can do is fight, we haven’t seen footage of a single dialogue and haven’t read any information regarding some other kind of interaction with the game. The only piece of information that sounds intriguing is that there will be disguises. I still fondly remember dressing up as a bandit in Gothic 2: Night of the Raven.

Status after update 11 – seemingly generic backdrop, seemingly generic premise, seemingly bland and generic character progression system that’s vaguely described, awful dialogue example, some mumbo-jumbo about 100 slots which just sounds silly and still no idea what the game is all about. Exploration? But how does it reward it? Factions? Not a word about those. Combat? Seems rather simple. Dungeon crawling? Didn’t see any dungeons. Story? With that backdrop and dialogue example, fat chance. But hey, it’s going to be like Morrowind. And GTA.

I express my concerns in the comments section of an internet article and even mention I would just love to be proven wrong. Luckily enough the creator of the game is here to calm my concerns: “I really don’t need to reply this, you’re just the last raging troll refusing to face extinction.” But wait now, he actually didn’t want to insult anyone, he even jokes about it (?!?!?!?!). Not that he apologizes or anything, nope. I guess he thought showing off cool tech and telling us he’s been wanting to make this game for 15 years will make us throw money at him, no questions asked. Any criticism, whether well-found or not, must be eradicated.

Status update – right now I honestly don’t want you to succeed. A person this immature can’t be trusted with 150k. Grow up first.

@Madoc
I think what’s left now is to make a concluding video about all the updates you have done so far, summing them up and quickly discuss the critique that I’ve also seen far too often by now.
I don’t think a text update alone will be enough for this, so shortly before the end of the kickstarter.

I did take that into consideration, believe me, if I hadn’t, that last comment of mine would’ve been a bit more fiery. That is indeed an explanation. But not an excuse. I work with clients on a daily basis and behavior like this would get me fired, regardless of what a bad day/ week/ month I’ve been having. Like I said, I can’t trust someone to deliver a product this ambitious (and ambiguous) when he behaves like a 13 year old.

Eh. Game development is a team effort. Diplomacy is a huge, huge part of that. Sometimes people will be bell-ends in your direction but you need to find a way to get your job done despite it rather than escalate.

The sideswipe at Unity users is pretty damning since it indicates a bad case of Not Invented Here, and wasting time reimplementing tools while other, more pragmatic people are getting on with using the ones that already exist.

Basically, made it easy to drop this one off the “thinking about it” list.

I wanted to believe in your project. I really, really did. You have shown us very little of actual worth, the game engine aside, but you were so enthusiastic at claiming that you’re just showing us the tip of the iceberg and that there’s a rich, detailed world with wonderful things hiding out of sight that I decided I really want to believe in you.

Now I believe I felt wrong. Your faith in what little you’ve already shown your audience is so blind that it borders on arrogance and it really makes me uncomfortable about backing your project. I’ll direct that money toward Dizzy Returns or Thorvalla instead, since they have huge minimum requirements and could use every backer.

I’m sorry. I do hope your project gets backed and I might even play it one day, but I no longer feel comfortable with you succeeding through my contributions.

I thought I was here in an entirely informal capacity. I’m having a squabble somewhere on the internet. I guess it hasn’t kicked in yet that everything I do is now considered PR. Until yesterday I was just another dude on the internet. Honestly, we might come across as somewhat professional (not in the literal sense) but when it comes to interfacing with the public we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. We’re learning and this is another experience. We know how to make 3D stuff go, we’ve made educational games and complex 3D applications. I have experience with dealing with (very high profile) clients and some with business. Being subjected to public opinion like this is completely new and frankly overwhelming.

That was largely an honest question. What kind of information would you consider sufficient? I agree that our writing sample is insufficient. We promised more but our writer has been heavily engaged with family and such with thanksgiving and whatnot. Still on it’s way…

I did think we were conveying quite a lot about the style of our world and what you might find. Nothing to do with what Xardas here is saying obviously, he’s talking about placeholder elements of our video which are typical in pre-alpha builds.

We’ve said it’s a low fantasy world, visually it’s closest to historical mediaeval Europe rather than metal bikinis, garish outfits and cartoonish fancy buildings. There are humans, mutants, horroristic beasts and “demons”. There is a feudal society that again is close to being historically accurate and backed by thorough research. There are people with psychic abilities that are quite different from the usual take on magic. These are not common. There is a vast non linear underworld that is related to the world’s past and tells a different story from what is apparent. If this sounds generic to you then fair enough but to say we’ve said nothing? I don’t really understand. We have talked about many of these things in quite some detail.

So far we haven’t received many realistic suggestions about how to convey more. Most of these are quite literally asking us to show more of a game that we have yet to developed. We can’t show more NPCs and interactions because we haven’t done those yet. That’s why we need a whole 18 months to come out with a game.

The same goes for going into more detail about creatures or anything else. We have a bunch of ideas, also beyond what I mention above, but we don’t have presentable concept art and exact charaterstics yet. Some of these may stick and some not. We don’t know how much we will actually be able to do yet either. This all needs to be done still and we’re a small team with jobs hoping to expand and work on the game full time. Our whole design is based on the concept that we can provide so much for a great game with lots of replayability even if it is relatively small. We can then expand on this almost indefinitely. We can develop our game world as pieces of a puzzle that we can assemble in many ways, there won’t be things like a complete map until release and even after it might change significantly. There really isn’t any need for these things to be set in stone yet.

Do you consider the depth we go into about gameplay mechanics insufficient? We could say a little more but not much. This is already very detailed for a game that has yet to be developed, especially when we get into what we “intend” to do. This stuff really needs to be implemented and tested before it can be confirmed. Much of it might not work very well or not be much fun, we need to develop it. We had all sorts of ideas about combat that we thought would be great and they proved to not be much fun at all. We changed our whole take on combat completely almost as soon as we got something working.

It’s not like we’re expecting everyone to just trust us to deliver something that they will like. We’re not going for mass appeal, we’re doing what we like. If you like it too then great, if not then don’t back us, it’s entirely optional. You’re not entering some contract with us by watching our (terrible) pitch video.

We got a lot of things wrong with our presentation and we’ve had some extremely useful feedback from the community and as much as possible we’ve been acting on it. We can’t reshoot the pitch video, doing it once was already extremely problematic. If we could we would remove all the crap ahout the tech. As much as possible, when people say “show me this” we try to do it. If you want us to prove something and it’s possible we will try.

Anyway, I think I’ve learned from this somewhat painful experience so that’s something at least.

>> Do you consider the depth we go into about gameplay mechanics insufficient?

No. Perhaps too much, instead. You overstated your goals and went into a lot of detail, which eventually left too many questions hanging. It was, in my opinion, a marketing mistake. You are now caught between a rock and a hard place. Had you tried to say less about the game (within reason) and you wouldn’t have to deal with the obvious naysayers you are facing now. The I-Know-It-Alls that populate RPS and so many other places like this… and who never even touched a single line of code or dabbled in game design before.

It sure didn’t help such strange decisions like the use of GTA. That one is just too confusing. You can always relate an elephant to a pen, or a spoon to a truck. But that just doesn’t stop it from being weird. And its hard to take seriously.

You however don’t really show anything less than what I’ve seen on other Kickstarter projects that regardless saw good funding come their way. You aren’t doing a bad job in Kickstarter. You just were the victim of bad circumstances…

I didn’t find it to be a particularly good pitch either. The engine looked nice and the combat looked different, but it looked different in the most ridiculous way possible. Over the course of the initial pitch video my opinion went from ‘wow, this looks interesting!’ to ‘these guys don’t really know what to do with this now that they have it…’

They made themselves look like tech developers rather than game developers, which is fair enough, but not something I particularly want to fund.

It was more a case of knowing what not to show. The ‘watch me flip tables over and move lights around’ bit was fine. Ignorance would have been bliss in the case of the combat, because that stuff was silly as hell and nowhere near ready to be shown to people.

That combat system was actually the reason for me to pledge. I was looking at the potential of it, not at it’s early development flaws. Because the important points about the combat system were not just promises, but already WORKING features. I was looking at what was already there, their proof of concept, not at what’s missing yet.
Just promising those combat mechanics wouldn’t have made me pledge. Showing me that they are already working is a completely different level.

The reason I never backed it, is simply because I think the engine is brilliant, but I have zero interest in their game. Everyone has an RPG idea in their head, and I think there are others, like me, who saw that engine and thought “Wow! I wish I had access to that to make my own RPG!”.

For me it’s more “gosh, that engine looks brilliant – I wish people I know and trust to develop compelling, enormous RPG worlds and storylines had access to it.” Engines are not games. The game bit is the hard part, and something of the scope Sui Generis promises to tackle is really, really hard, especially with that small a team. I’d rather see something of a modest, even restrained scope that proves the team’s bona fides to be able to generate compelling content. -Then- I would be up for backing something epic.

If they didn’t mean for it to be taken as an indication of the style of dialogue they’re shooting for, they probably shouldn’t have described it as “a brief but great example of the style of dialogue that will typically feature in Sui Generis.”

YES!
exactly, I have shown this game to pretty much everyone I know, and my eyes always roll uncontrollably, when they mention “yeah, nice physics, but the animations are so wonky, and where is the actual game?”
God damn, it doesn’t exist, that why it’s on kickstarter.

If that engine is what they were able to come up with in a year without funding and full jobs, then let’s see how they can do with funding. And reading the updates, it’s not as if they plan the rest of the game to be generic in ANY way.
No attack values, just physic based damage.
No stats.
No levels.
No exp.
No Inventory slots.
No main quests that just wait until you arrive.

By now I pretty much pray that some other devs or even a studio will pledge the remaining difference on the last day.

The problem I have with this argument, is that lots of devs have an engine – Unreal, Unity etc. They can’t nessacarily make a game using it though. I’d like to see them try, but since they keep losing their rag on the net, I just don’t trust them to do it with my money. Best of luck to them though.

The problem I have is while removing all of those things makes you seem like you’re making a ‘non-generic’ game, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making a good game.

A lot of what developers do (and have been doing for years, and why they still do them today) they do for very, very good reasons. And that’s because it makes games better.

Now, that might not be the case here, and the guys might pull out something special, but when a bunch of people appear and say “We’ve never made a game before, but we have a shiny engine,” I get a little nervous. Because as much as it looks easy, game development, especially good game development, is really, really hard. And having a nice engine is such a small part of it.

I backed both Maia and Sui Generis, and I hope they make it. It would be a damn shame if they didn’t (especially Maia).

Also worth a read is Rab Florence’s take on Molyneux and Kickstarter, which begins “They will kill it”.link to effingarcade.tumblr.com
(I’d link directly, but I’m not exactly sure how, so you’ll have to scroll down a bit)

I think he’s right with some cases like Molyneux, who sold his former two studios to EA and Microsoft respectively, has lots of money and even bankrolled Black & White with $6 Million of his own money back in the day: link to gamespot.com

Not to say that he founded his late studio and made his first “experiment” the same way, but I guess free money and publicity is just that.

Another example would be Chris Roberts, who had a lot of other options at his disposal.

He would be wrong with others like Obsidian, inXile, Double Fine which until recently lived under fear of looming Layoffs and desperately trying to get some new projects to survive.

My feeling is that Kickstarter is just another way of funding something, and anyone is welcome to try. I’ve backed some of the big names and a lot of little ones, and I guess I’ll see how that works out in the next few years.

True, but don’t you see anything cynical about people with millions in the bank, or those with a lot of other options trying to bankroll their projects and offload the risk on their potential customers?

I wonder how people would react if Activision tried asking for money for the next Call of Duty or something with Pre-Order incentives or if EA tried doing the next BioWare game this way.

KickStarter was initially conceived to give creative projects and startups that wouldn’t happen otherwise basically a “Kickstart” so they can manage on their own. But it seems to be used as a marketing tool and an easy low-risk way to get money instead more and more lately.
It’s always a delicate balance for me between projects that actually need the money to get going or complete without other options and others that are there because of “free money!”.

I don’t particularly like how Fargo put it in an interview recently either, basically looking at it as an option to easy money and free marketing/cutting the marketing budget of a game because of invested “superfans”: link to gamesindustry.biz

“Speaking to GamesIndustry International at this year’s Unite conference in Amsterdam, Fargo explained that the benefits that a platform like Kickstarter offers are too powerful to disregard, even if you have money in the bank.

“Yeah, I still would [return to crowd-funding],” Fargo said. “It allows us to give things to people that they can’t get from just buying a product. Some people want to be an NPC, or they want a shrine in their honour in the game, or they want a boxed copy, or a novella. These things aren’t just gimmicks; they add real value.”

“It’s also a great way of vetting the product in general. I like having that communication, because when people put their money down they’re more invested emotionally. And when you have this army of people who are a part of it, when you do launch you don’t need a big marketing campaign.”

The amount of money you can get from Kickstarter is far below the sort of level a major publisher (like Activision or EA) would be looking for, so that’s not the best comparison.

There probably will be a number of cynical campaigns by people who could fund their own projects anyway, but Kickstarter is very much a lesson in “buyer beware”. If you feel like you can’t trust a project, or can’t justify spending the money on something you might not see for two years, then it’s all in your hands to reject it.

How would you know? It’s not exactly like they tried yet. I’d imagine a rabid and large fanbase like the Call of Duty, WarCraft or Mass Effect crowd would be rather vocal about something like that.
CoD4 is said to have cost $20 million and the Star Citizen campaign has already managed to procure almost $7 million mainly by selling imaginary virtual ships in a game that has yet to exist: link to robertsspaceindustries.com
And publishers would still be in the comfortable position of paying for the rest on their own.

They could even exploit people more efficiently with DLC long before a game launches, and just imagine what’d happen if they set people against each other by being able to vote on certain features in the game with their money (romances or maps, weapons of choice/perks being made seem to be rather popular options – “Pick this tier if you want feature X, we will count the votes at the end and the Top two win.” or something similar).

They could even offer Advertising options in their games on some of the higher tiers.

Such exploitation requires people to actually pay for the product. If people are willing to pay for it, then why shouldn’t they try? After all, people already buy games pre-order (including expensive collectors editions), without having played the game or seen a single review.

It’s not the sort of thing I would back, but I doubt it would obscure those projects which I do. EA trying to exploit the system is unlikely to prevent the likes of Grim Dawn, Xenonauts or Hero-U being funded and made.

dexter you seem to have a problem with people that have money when it shouldn’t even be a factor. I mean your really sitting there telling us to judge if a project is okay for crowd funding based on the persons bank account? How about we judge it on the merit of its idea and the people behind it. Just like we have been doing You keep throwing around the word exploit like it has some sort of relevance here when it doesn’t. WE are in control 100% no one is being exploited we are all making our own decisions based on the information at hand. People are not pledging 100s of dollars to star citizen just for a shiny new ship they are throwing 100s of dollars because they believe in the idea and they want it to succeed and they believe the man behind the idea can achieve it. I mean honestly this reeks of class warfare to me. It feels like your trying to divide the haves vs the have nots by perpetuating this idea that if CoD shows up on kickstarter we will all be too helpless to control ourselves and Activision is so evil that they will turn the community on each other, sell ad space or whatever ridiculous thing you can imagine. really your argument is petty and weak and relies on sensationalist hyperbole to even begin to make any kind of sense.

Why the hell shouldn’t it be a factor? Of course it’s a factor if someone goes to KickStarter or in general starts a Crowdfunding campaign as one of his only (or only) chance to get something made. Fargo even made that and the publishers that wouldn’t fund his game despite trying for years one of the main narratives of his Wasteland 2 campaign.

I don’t think Multi-Billion $ companies or people well within their capabilities to make their own games because they’re Multi-Millionaires should go that way on the basis of it being a cost-cutting measure that offloads their risk unto others. There’s still a reason why products are being sold in stores when they are done and I believe there was a recent article in regards to what Pre-Ordering has devolved to and how it is potentially poisonous not too long ago: link to rockpapershotgun.com

I don’t think they will “kill” KickStarter or anything like that, more well-known campaigns like the Double Fine Adventure or Wasteland 2 have even shown to bring people to the specific platform through their popularity, but it’s deeply cynical and might damage parts of the idea if it goes on.

Exploit nowadays is also pretty much a “business term” CEOs and the likes throw around without much thought, that’s because they’re not in the business to “make their dream game” or “make a really good game everyone likes” but to literally exploit franchises and games to their highest possible monetary potential and that’s pretty much how they think and what they’re paid to do, if they think a Crowdfunding campaign can help them to that end they will jump on it e.g. there’s a few famous quotes like the one by Bobby Kotick:

“With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us.”
There was even a Penny Arcade comic thing: link to art.penny-arcade.com

Of course we’ve already seen the “Old School RPG” (or whatever it was called) fail, so big names are no protection if people aren’t willing to give you money.

For what it’s worth, I backed Elite: Dangerous because I really enjoyed Elite Plus back in the day, and I certainly like the idea of a new, bigger, better Elite game. I haven’t backed GODUS, but then I never played Populous and wasn’t impressed by Black & White.

I mean, obviously no publisher would publish Star Citizen, considering the fact that no space sim outside of Russia has been published this past decade, and has been declared a dead genre.

Mind you that Chris isn’t relying on the crowdfunding as the primary resource for Star Citizen, the game actually costs around 10 to 20 million USD to make, so he is relying on private investors to cover the production expenses. The fundraiser was a requirement to convince the private investors of the financial viability of the game, in light of the death of the genre the game is set in. As well as giving players the chance to participate in the development process itself.

We are being exploited for things we love? Er, what’s the problem, exactly?

Can’t say I agree with Rab on this one. It’s a very cynical view of the situation. Is he honestly telling us that Braben has taken 17 years to announce Elite IV becase he was swamped with options on how to fund it? That Molyneux has spent over a decade making console-friendly Xbox games because he’s getting offers left, right and centre to fund what he really wants to make?

Also, he’s flat-out ignored the fact that we have A CHOICE about whether to fund the thing or not. No-one is forcing anyone to pay into these things – Braben’s going to struggle to reach his target precisely because many folks don’t trust he can deliver. We didn’t get that choice before, in the old model. We didn’t get anywhere near that level of dialogue with the creator, and now we do. THAT’s what’s worth paying a little bit extra for, imho.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure it’s his actual opinion, but couched in a lot of hyperbole and furious anger to fit the in-character blog… but yeah, it’s been catching everyone out. Not that Rab Florence hasn’t written plenty of beautifully crazed columns in the past but reading over that tumblr was very wtf until I found the actually about link.

This looks really promising for pre-alpha. The campaign started shakily but I don’t understand the depth of negativity – it’s *Elite* people! Has Braben upset people in the press or was the original just too long ago for people to get excited?

Have you waited 17 years for this? I have. Have you charted every promise he’s ever made but then failed to back up over the course of that 17 years? I have.

Am I fed up waiting? Yes. Do I think David can deliver? Perhaps, but any enthusiasm I had for a fourth game died quite some time ago. Don’t get me wrong, I do think it would be great to see it but my aching heart just won’t risk being disappointed again.

Wow, that’s some wait. I was introduced to Frontier first, then Elite. Somehow I’d managed to avoid playing it during my formative years. So for me Frontier is the special one. :) Going back to Elite was fascinating but I rebounded hard off the control system. and preferred the greater graphical fidelity of Frontier, the leaps towards realism it offered.

I just watched the Dev video someone posted above/below. Slowly but surely Dangerous is taking shape. I’d honestly love to see it produced. Best of luck to them all.

Braben upset people in the gaming world a long time ago when he ALLEGEDLY screwed Ian Bell (co-creator of Elite) out of any royalties for any sequels to the series after Elite 2. We won’t forget that!

Elite made by Braben without Bell is like Sgt. Pepper made by McCartney without Lennon even though Lennon didn’t really have anything to do with the writing of that album apart from two songs so maybe that’s not the greatest analogy but oh you know what I mean probably.

I think a large part of the problem with the Ars Magica kickstarter was that they didn’t make nearly enough effort to explain it to people who didn’t already play the tabletop rpg – and that’s a pretty small market to go to for funding! It was easy to think it would be like Academagia, and they didn’t make it clear how different the plan was. That plus an expensive buy in ($20 for the game, where a lot of games are $15) discouraged people from picking it up on spec, I think.

And the higher pledge levels never seemed that rewarding, especially since several of them gave sourcebooks for the RPG – not much use to people who were only there for the computer game!

I do hope they’ll learn from their first try and give it another go, because I think it could work if they marketed it differently.

>I think a large part of the problem with the Ars Magica kickstarter was that they didn’t make nearly enough effort to explain it to people who didn’t already play the tabletop rpg

For me the pitch was too weak on explaining exactly what it was going to be. Like Academagica, like some said? Like King of Dragon Pass? There were lots of talk about how incredibly awesome the tabletop game was, but since I hadn’t played it, I could only take their word for it.

How did it play? How would it translate the tabletop mechanics to a computer? That was what was missing for me.

I was a big fan of the Ars Magica RPG back in the day, but the reason I never backed this was because I could never understand how the transition to a computer game could ever happen.

The unique (to me at least, I’m sure it’s been done elsewhere) mechanic in Ars Magica was that you could use magic to do absolutely *anything* imaginable, with the GM assigning a particular difficulty to the spell, Each mage had a different points value in different “verbs” (create, change, destroy etc.) and “nouns” (fire, water, plant, image) which would be combined to make the attempt.

The only game that’s come close to this amount of freedom would be something like scribblenauts, I guess.

I discovered Limit theory a few days ago. I’m so happy to see he’s now past his half-way point. His game sounds fantastic, waaay more exciting than Elite: Dangerous. Josh gets my monies, and I’ll be following progress very keenly from now on.

I have to agree there! Josh and I have been in contact over KS and I gotta say, I’m simply blown away by his project. He’s also a real professional and I was really touched that he had encouraging words to offer us, what with us being a smaller project. I just know they’ll be successful!

I don’t trust or fund the vast majority of Kickstarters, but I did fund this one. The guy has a fairly down to earth pitch, unlike some of the others which are strung out in space. It sounds like he’s aiming for a kind of Freelancer Done Right (maybe that’s trademarked now?) and from his early screenshots I’d say he’s not far off it. Can’t wait to see how it turns out!

Yes, Limit Theory has my backing, but not Elite: Dangerous. Fascinating that one guy can do so much in such a short period of time, and have a much better grasp of how Kickstarter works and appeals to people than a large development company with plenty of apparent experience. I’m sure Elite: Dangerous will get funded at some point, but I’d rather encourage those with more limited resources.

I’m not sure how much the issues he raises are that big of a deal (from my point of view, anyway).
1. Certainly the transition from dream to reality in terms of game development could be troublesome, which is probably why many pitches on kickstarter are so vague (gives them a little breathing room to alter the design post-funding).
2. As for motivation, I suppose I’ve not really paid attention to the projected shipping dates for the games I’ve backed. A lot of games, no matter how they were funded, have had release date slippages.
3. Committee design problems can occur with any game, and most of the games I’ve funded through kickstarter are not asking for any ideas from backers.
4. Well, I’ve already backed one game to get my name in it. I guess if a project had too many options like this that might detract from the experience, I would consider not funding it. Most of the issues with people paying more for in-game bonuses seem to be multiplayer-related (like in certain free to play games), and I’ve never been much of a multiplayer gamer.

His first two points aren’t valid, because the Kickstarters that have people’s backing and attention are beyond the design doc stage. If they weren’t, any of us could throw up a kickstarter and get a couple of hundred thousand, but people are more discerning than he is giving them credit for.

I’m not really sure the Oliver twins made much in the way of loot from the Dizzy series in the end. But on the other paw, I can’t for the life of me work out how you’d spend a third of a million quid making a new dizzy game. Strikes me as a one programmer, two artists and a sound guy job. Maybe 100K max.

After losing 20 percent in fees and expenses (and that’s low balling it), they would have enough to pay a 20k salary (before NI contributions) to four devs. How is that enough – who’s going to be attracted by tat kind of money?

Not really, as much as I encourage up and coming indie devs, if I am going to risk my money or invest it in a game, I would feel better investing it in the hands of veteran devs. I know the Oliver twins and Molyneux can deliver, and both have great games under their belt, that alone gives me confidence.

I’d rather give the newcomer a chance, actually. The Oliver Twins weren’t veteran devs when they made the first Dizzy game, why not give new blood a chance. Frankly Spud’s Quest looks (and plays, based on the demo) far better than any Dizzy game I’ve ever played anyway.

I am incredibly sceptical about this KS by Peter Molyneux to be honest.

This is after all Peter Molyneux we’re talking about here.
The man who’ll promise you the moon even though you know he’s far more likely to bring you a shiny rock instead. It’s still a pretty rock, but it’s nowhere near what he promised.

This sounds exactly like that, he’s promising a god-game like no other before it, a blend of some of the best classic Bullfrog games in existence, yet I doubt it’ll be anywhere near his vision once it comes out. He’ll probably immediately flit on to the next project, never bringing the games up to the image he painted while pitching the game to either the publishers or us, the gamers who play them.
All the while crying about how his last project had some big mistakes, and that it really wasn’t his fault for failing to make the game live up to the expectations he himself created for it.

So no, this won’t get my support. I’ll see it once it comes out (IF it comes out), if it’s good, or even better, as good as he promised. Then, and only then, will I part with my money.
Not on the word of a man who’s well known for failing to deliver on his promises.

“For many, pledges to turn-based RPGs will always come second to spending on friends, family and personal appreciation at this time of the year. Timing could be everything.”

Eh…can’t the same be said about any Kickstarter project, regardless of genre? Why single out turn-based RPGs; which after all have been much more of a success story in the weird world of crowdfunding than, say, mainstream things like first-person shooters or real-time strategy games?

The Internet is replete with tragic individuals incessantly reading between the lines while constructing underlying assumptions and biases which simply aren’t there to begin with, but in the context of this article as a whole it’s very hard not to interpret the quoted sentence above as a backhanded dismissal of party-based old school RPGs specifically…

We can’t thank you enough for letting your readers know about Predestination, Adam! I just bounced on to say a massive thanks to the folks who have backed us so far, and that if anyone has any questions about the project so far, please just let me know!

I’m getting a bit worried about Below, to be honest. I’m sure if it gets funded it will be terrific just like Failbetter’s other efforts, but after the initial wave of support it’s been pretty stagnant, and the tracking projections keep dropping. Prototype or no prototype I really do think they need to do more updates.

For some reason I’m compelled to know what and where the floor of the katchup column is. It’s been weeks and I’ve only hesitantly posed that question to myself, but now I put it to the hivemind. Are we looking at John Walker’s ketchup-stained kitchen? Adam’s shameful condiment cupboard? I must know. I must.

I’d settle for 120k, which includes a singleplayer campaign and story and modding tools for other people to make more of that sort of thing. Seems possible at this stage. Not that the robot editor would hurt.

I backed Limit Theory, but am baffled by its ready success. The kid seems ambitious and capable, but other than a short space animation and a bunch of great sounding features ticked-off on a sheet of paper, there’s no indication that any of what he’s aiming for is even remotely reasonable. It’s ridiculously ambitious for a seasoned indie developer; much less a first-timer. I hope the best for him and the project, but . . . I really am not understanding why the same critical eye put on every other project isn’t being put on this one. Weird.